Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Almost 300 people from the agriculture industry across Greece gathered together symbolically outside the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair on Thursday, to send a “political message” that they are present and will be monitoring developments relating ...

The Greek Prime Minister is the country's Head of Government, directly at the helm of the Greek Cabinet. The official flag of Greece. The Greek Prime Minister is the country’s Head of Government, directly at the helm of the Greek Cabinet. The position of ...

Reducing non-performing loans (NPLs) drastically by 38 percent in the next three years, accelerating the return of bank deposits and further removing restrictions on capital movement are very important challenges which the Greek banking system will make ...

Stretching 185 miles between the Pindus Range and the Aegean Sea, the Haliacmon is the longest river wholly in Greece. The Haliacmon is the longest river in Greece. Stretching 185 miles between the Pindus Range and the Aegean Sea, the Haliacmon is the ...

Premier Paolo Gentiloni told reporters Thursday night after meeting Libyan Premier Fayez Serraj in Rome that the two sides signed a memo of understanding to step up cooperation and, with Italian assistance, help fight the migrant trafficking. Greek authorities say eight officers from Europe's Frontex border agency have started patrols on Greece's northern border with Macedonia to deter illegal crossings by migrants. More than 62,000 refugees and other migrants have been stuck in Greece since a series of Balkan border closures last year and a deal between the European Union and Turkey to limit migrant flows. A decade-old program to resettle a fixed quota of refugees arriving in the small, southern EU nation of Malta to the United States is another casualty of President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration. EU President Donald Tusk said Thursday after talks with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni that "I can assure you that it is within our reach" to cut off the smuggling routes, as expectations are rising that drownings will increase as the spring weather comes.

[Greece tourist selfie]REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton You sit in your cubicle, staring out the window into the cold, gray, February abyss. But before you get ahead of yourself and book that pricey villa in Tulum you've been eyeing since December, pay heed to one key word here: Plan. You don't want to get back from a week of floating in the Caribbean only to drown in credit card debt for the rest of 2017. Luckily, the responsible savers at Frugal Fringe created a labor cost calculator, so you can figure out exactly how many hours you need to work in order to afford your next getaway. You can try the calculator for yourself here, but it's not the easiest to use, so let us walk you through it first. What this calculator lacks in simplicity it makes up for in accuracy. It factors in everything from local taxes to your commute time. Here's how to use it. [labor calculator how to]REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton FIRST, ENTER YOUR ANNUAL GROSS SALARY. That's your total income before taxes. For the sake of this demonstration, let's say you're making $80,000 a year. NEXT, FIND YOUR TOP MARGINAL FEDERAL TAX RATE. Taxfoundation.org lists the tax bracket that applies to you based on your income and marital status. Let's say yours came out to 25%. NOW, ADD YOUR TOP MARGINAL STATE AND LOCAL TAX RATES. You can find these rates based on your location here. Let's say you live in Brooklyn. You would add the 2017 New York State marginal tax rate with the city tax rate and get a combined 8.875%. CALCULATE YOUR TOTAL HOURS WORKED PER YEAR. The average American works 1,790 hours each year. Let's say you're one of them. COUNT THE NUMBER OF HOURS YOU SPEND COMMUTING PER YEAR. It takes the average American 26 minutes to commute to work every day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. If you work five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that comes out to about 216.7 hours. Depressing, right? No wonder you need a vacation. FINALLY, INPUT THE TOTAL COST OF YOUR DREAM VACATION. You'll need to factor in round-trip flights, hotel stay and spending money for food and drinks, activities, taxis or a car rental and shopping. Let's say your Mexico dreams are cashing in at about $4,000. AND GO. You'll need to work 171.59 hours to pay off that trip. If you work eight hour days, that's about three weeks of work for your five-day trip. That may sound kind of sad, but hey, quit sulking and get back to work. The beach is waiting. NOW WATCH: Here are all the musicians who declined to perform at Trump's inauguration so far

[Steve Bannon]Carlo Allegri/Getty Images President Trump's adviser, Steve Bannon, is on the cover of this week's Time magazine, and in the piece it is revealed that Bannon deeply believes in a theory about America's future laid out in a book called "The Fourth Turning: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny." This fact that should concern every American. In the book, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe theorize that the history of a people moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called "saeculum." The idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that at a given saeculum's end, there would come "ekpyrosis," a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire. This era of change is known as the Fourth Turning, and Bannon, like Strauss and Howe, believes we are in the midst of one right now. According to the book, the last two Fourth Turnings that America experienced were the Civil War and the Reconstruction, and then the Great Depression and World War II. Before that, it was the Revolutionary War. All these were marked by periods of dread and decay in which the American people were forced to unite to rebuild a new future, but only after a massive conflict in which many lives were lost. It all starts with a catalyst event, then there's a period of regeneracy, after that there is a defining climax in which a war for the old order is fought, and then finally there is a resolution in which a new world order is stabilized. This is where Bannon's obsession with this book should cause concern. He believes that, for the new world order to rise, there must be a massive reckoning. That we will soon reach our climax conflict. In the White House, he has shown that he is willing to advise Trump to enact policies that will disrupt our current order to bring about what he perceives as a necessary new one. He encourages breaking down political and economic alliances and turning away from traditional American principles to cause chaos. In that way, Bannon seems to be trying to bring about the Fourth Turning. THE BOOK IN BANNON Bannon has never been secretive about his desire to use Trump to bring about his vision of America. He told Vanity Fair last summer that Trump was a "blunt instrument for us ... I don’t know whether he really gets it or not." Perhaps not, but putting a Fourth Turning lens on Trump's policies certainly give them a great deal of context. Bannon believes that the catalyst for the Fourth Turning has already happened: the financial crisis. So now we are in the regeneracy. Howe and Strauss describe this period as one of isolationism, one of infrastructure building and of strong, centralized government power, and a reimagination of the economy. Of course it's important not to lose sight of the end here. Bannon believes in authoritarian politics as preparation for a massive conflict between East and West, whether East means the Middle East or China. [china military]Carlo Allegri/Getty Images Over the years, Bannon has unsuccessfully tried to pressure historians such as David Kaiser, now at MIT, to say the same thing. From Time: "I remember him saying, 'Well, look, you have the American revolution, and then you have the Civil War, which was bigger than the revolution. And you have the Second World War, which was bigger than the Civil War,' Kaiser said. 'He even wanted me to say that on camera, and I was not willing.' "Howe, too, was struck by what he calls Bannon's 'rather severe outlook on what our nation is going through.' Bannon noted repeatedly on his radio show that 'we're at war' with radical jihadis in places around the world. This is 'a global existential war' that likely will become 'a major shooting war in the Middle East again.' War with China may also be looming, he has said. This conviction is central to the Breitbart mission, he explained in November 2015: 'Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we're at war.'" THE REALITY OF REPETITION Ultimately, the danger of writing about the past at the same time one writes about the future is that it can be hard for an author to separate the two. The steps and missteps of the past seem so easily repeatable that the future seems to march in lockstep. But this is not what history has shown us. The catastrophes of every era have always materialized in their own unique ways. It is here where Strauss and Howe fail in their work, and here where Bannon gets caught in their failure. The authors mention in passing that the event that brings us into a crisis could be "as ominous as a financial crisis or as ordinary as a national election." This makes sense. The Fourth Turning of the Civil War and Reconstruction played out differently than the Fourth Turning afterward, the Depression and World War II. But Strauss and Howe fail to recognize that difference in their description of the Fourth Turning to come. They forget that no two Turnings are alike; instead, they get trapped thinking that the last catalyst — the Great Depression, a financial crisis — was the next one as well, and Bannon does too. This is why he believes that the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was the catalyst of our crisis, just as the Great Depression was the catalyst in the previous saeculum. But the two are not comparable. Unemployment in the US never reached 20%, as it did then; it hit 10% in October 2009. In 2008 the government acted fast to prevent a full global meltdown, and it did not allow the situation to deteriorate the way President Herbert Hoover and his administration did for two years. Instead of all of America suffering as one, what the financial crisis brought on was an exacerbation of the inequality growing in the world for the 40 years before it. So when President Franklin Roosevelt described a country laid waste by the Great Depression in his inaugural address in 1933, he was describing a picture that all Americans were seeing. On the other hand Trump, in his inaugural, described a dark "American carnage" that many did not recognize. That lack of recognition marked our deep division as a country. [Trump inauguration speech]Carlo Allegri/Getty Images ALIGNMENT So perhaps there is a Fourth Turning to come, but Bannon is not an architect of its initiation. According to Howe and Strauss, unity is the defining feature of the Regeneracy. It is what allows leaders during a crisis to become "authoritarian, severe, unyielding" in commanding resources in order to rebuild society. This is what allowed FDR to command the full force of government to put people back to work. But unity is less apparent in American society than it has been in years. Quite the contrary, our society is showing division as never before. The stars of the "Fourth Turning" are baby boomers and millennials. Boomers are the ideologues who lead our country into conflict through folly; millennials are cast as the young heroes that bring them out of it. Once the catalyst event takes place, Strauss and Howe describe a situation in which America coalesces under one leader — a boomer "Gray Warrior" — who will "urgently resist the idea that a second consecutive generation might be denied the American Dream. No matter how shattered the economy ... " [Millennials vs Boomers on gay marriage immigration]Carlo Allegri/Getty ImagesIf Bannon believes that he is working for this Gray Warrior, then he's missing a very important point: Millennials are the ones who lead the way forward out of crisis in this story, but considering the needs of the young has never had any place under Trumpism. Trump's words appealed most to older generations who felt like something had been taken away from them, not to younger generations who felt like they were never given a chance at the American Dream in the first place. The majority of young people who voted in 2016 voted against President Trump, and even more millennials chose to stay home. That is, in part, because Trump never offered young people anything. I n July, at the Republican National Convention, the national head of the young Republicans, Alexandra Smith, warned her party about this. "For too long Republicans haven't been making their case to millennials," Smith said, her saccharine tone smoothing over the severity of the situation. "There's just too much old and not enough grand in the way we express our party's value to the next generation of voters." "The Fourth Turning" envisioned by Howe and Strauss requires a return to an agreed-upon set of values, but millennials and the GOP (or Bannon for that matter) couldn't be farther away from one another. For one, millennials are the most diverse group in US history (43% of them are nonwhite). Most do not share Bannon's vision for ethnic conflict. "The Fourth Turning" is the story of our country unifying against internal struggles and an outside threat. The authors describe it as the natural course of history, as something that just falls into place. Instead, what we are seeing, with Trump's travel ban and his threats against Mexico and China, is the creation of enemies, enemies many Americans don't want to have. Instead of uniting us, Bannon's belief in "The Fourth Turning" is dividing us. This is dangerous, uncharted territory. What comes next is, as always, unwritten. NOW WATCH: Here's the massive gap in average income between the top 1% and the bottom 99% in every state

This sparked Turkish fears of Cyprus unifying with Greece, and prompted Turkey to stage a military intervention. After a ceasefire subdued the fighting, the country was split into the Republic of Cyprus—the internationally recognized southern two thirds ...

As reports in the Greek media insisted Thursday that the Syriza-ANEL coalition government is closer to agreeing to impose extra austerity measures in order to conclude the bailout review, Finance Ministry sources released a statement commenting on its talks with the country’s creditors. A Finance Ministry announcement made clear that a recent teleconference with […]

Chicago is lousy with Mediterranean restaurants serving meat on pita. Though there obviously are exceptions, these places can usually be broken down into two kinds. The first is the corner Greek-American joint with the cone of compressed meat spinning ...

Investing.com – Greece stocks were higher after the close on Thursday, as gains in the Construction, Utilities and Banking sectors led shares higher. At the close in Athens, the Athens General-Composite gained 0.67%. Rising stocks outnumbered declining ...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel criticised the German government's handling of Greece in a letter he wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, a newspaper reported on Thursday. Handelsblatt newspaper said Gabriel - who swapped ...

The resort hotels had a strong Q4 sourced by significant increases of international arrivals at main airports during Q4 2016 compared to same quarter last year. International arrivals at the Athens International Airport increased by 8.9% y-o-y in 2016 ...

NORWAY’S peculiar relationship with the European Union—it abides by most EU rules but has little say in writing them—might be a democratic outrage, a diplomatic relic and an international oddity, but it once worked out well for Torild Skogsholm. In 2003 Ms Skogsholm was invited to join her fellow European transport ministers aboard a cruise ship in the Aegean (Greece held the rotating EU presidency at the time). Asked to leave the room when the ministers began to draw up legislative proposals, she had little choice but to sun herself on the ship’s deck. The tan she earned, she says, was the envy of her friends in Oslo. Britain’s ministers may be almost as sun-starved as their Norwegian cousins, but they will not be aping their approach to the EU. Through its membership of the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes two tiddlers, Iceland and Liechtenstein, Norway follows most single-market rules drawn up in Brussels and must accept the free movement of EU workers. This was enough for Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, to rule out the Norwegian model for her country’s post-Brexit relations with the EU. After all, Britain voted last June to...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a heavy agenda in her luggage: human rights, press freedom, refugees, extradition of Turkish asylum seekers, persecutions, terrorism, EU relations, a bit of Greek-Turkish relations and the upcoming Referendum over constitution reforms that will grant President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with almighty powers. The leader of […]

A Syrian woman stands holding a banner that reads in Turkish ''we are migrants, we will pass'' and in Arabic (top), "We are only crossing, our aim is peaceful to secure humanitarian passage allowing refugees to enter Greece," on Sept. 16, 2015, on their ...

Teachers in Greece have criticised plans by the leftwing government to scrap the mandatory study of Ancient Greek tragedy in high schools and introduce instead classes on gender and sex education, saying that this could bring about the end of classical ...

This Restaurant has been open for just 4 days in our sweet town of Caldwell. We've been here twice already! What a Great place with just delicious EVERYTHING! The owner couldn't be nicer. The staff is so friendly. The place is clean and welcoming.

Carnegie Hall will host An evening of chamber music Feb. 21 by acclaimed Greek composer Dinos Constantinides. The post DCINY Will Present Music of Dinos Constantinides at Carnegie Hall appeared first on The National Herald.

Greece's former ruling coalition, New Democracy and PASOK owe 250 million euros to banks and aren't paying. The post Letter from Athens: How New Democracy, PASOK, Greek Parties Got Away With Bank Robbery appeared first on The National Herald.

Sunderland failed in a late bid to bring Greek international midfielder Andreas Samaris to the club, according to reports. The Benfica defensive-minded player was linked with a move to Stadium of Light during the January transfer window, with some reports ...

In a parting shot before leaving his post as German economics minister, Sigmar Gabriel wrote a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel sharply criticizing the country’s policy toward Greece. In the letter, sent at the start of January and seen by Handelsblatt ...

Athens, Greece, February 2, 2017 (Newswire.com) - Volunteers from the Church of Scientology Athens gathered in the city’s famous Syntagma Square to raise awareness of the dangers of drugs and promote drug-free living. They held a drug prevention rally ...

Pre-bookings for the 2017 tourism season to date reveal a “dynamic” demand for Greece, a fact that can help the country achieve its fiscal targets to a large extent, according to Bank of Greece (BoG) Governor Yannis Stournaras and the Greek Tourism ...

Greece returned on Thursday five Syrian refugees to Adana, Turkey, under the EU-Turkey agreement. The scheduled return of another 13 refugees from Mytilene to the port of Dikili, Turkey, was postponed for February 10 due to technical problems from the Turkish side. (source: ana-mpa)

“Some things cannot be agreed unless they are agreed together as a package,” Greece’s Foreign Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said on Thursday, replying to criticism about alleged delays in implementing measures for concluding the 2nd review of Greece’s program. Replying to main opposition New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Tsakalotos said that the ‘delays’ only concerned the […]

“We defend the international and European law and we reiterate that legality is Greece’s weapon in the international arena,” said Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias on Thursday in his address at a pie cutting ceremony held at the Foreign Ministry. “Greece is a country that believes in peaceful coexistence, in cooperation with its neighbors internationally and […]

How would you like to trade in the Australian winter, for summer in Greece? Well that could be more of a reality for those who are strapped for cash, thanks to budget airline Scoot whose flights are now on sale from Australia to Athens. The new tariffs ...

The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and the European Humanist Federation (EHF) are calling on Greece’s new human rights chief to work to abolish the country’s actively-used “blasphemy” law. (Download the open letter below.

President Nicos Anastasiades and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will hold consultations in either Nicosia or Athens before a new Conference on Cyprus, according to sources. Informed diplomatic sources have said that most probably the Greek PM will ...

On behalf of our dynamic Pastor, Rev. Henry E. Green, Jr., we cordially invite the entire community to our 23rd Annual Greek Unity Day Observance. Through this program we acknowledge and recognize Black Greek lettered organizations for their ...

Abiola Dauda got both goals for Atromitos in their 2-0 victory over Lamia in a Greek Cup encounter on Wednesday. The Peristeri Stadium outfit were held to a 2-2 draw in the first leg, where the Nigerian found the back of the net twice. And in the second ...

European creditors continue the hard line towards the Greek government with a clear message: The institutions representatives will not return to Athens if the government does not agree to legislate now additional austerity measures for the years 2019 and 2020. Citing an anonymous sources in Brussels, private ANT1 TV reported, […]

Here at Awful Announcing, and across the sports media world, we spent a lot of time talking about TV. And while TV is a fun and dynamic medium (and, more importantly, pays the bills) we sometimes forget the less-heralded heroes of sports media: the writers.

[Two ships leave the Grand Harbour in Valletta, Malta, on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017. European heads of state will meet in Malta on Friday for an informal summit to discuss migration and the future of the EU. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)]VALLETTA, Malta (AP) — The Latest on Europe's migration influx (all times local):

Greece is to lower the tax-free threshold for low incomes in order to close the evaluation of the bailout program, a Kathimerini report says. The proposal for lowering the tax-free threshold to incomes of 6,000 euros per year and above is so that the Greek ...

Citrus fruits are a staple of Mediterranean cooking. From a squeeze of fresh lemon juice on grilled meats or cooked greens and salads to sweet orange desserts, Greek cuisine often... The post A Tasty Citrus Dessert- Orange Cake appeared first on The National Herald.

It's a word that hasn't been heard for a while in Athens, but the spectre of a Grexit, or Greece leaving the eurozone, has been raised again. A leaked memo from the International Monetary Fund says the country's debt could become "explosive" unless its EU ...